Martin Luther King’s vision was of a colorblind society. Slowly but steadily, in the years since his death, we have worked to make that legacy a reality, culminating in the election of an African American as President of the United States. Yet what should have been a high point for race relations in this country was instead undermined by the very person who could have embodied MLK’s vision.
The Obama administration from top to bottom started looking for race in everything, from Dodd-Frank to college admissions to discrimination in auto loans. . He was a huge proponent of disparate impact theory. This theory states that if a group is not proportionately represented, the reason is automatically bias. This theory would hold that if white people are underrepresented in professional football, the reason is racial prejudice. No need to look at other non-bias reasons that could account for the numbers. For instance, when disparate impact theory was applied to auto loans, it created lawsuits against dealerships for discriminating against black buyers even though in reality the dealers were never given any information related to race on applications when processing loan applications. Obama ultimately had all of his policy departments, especially employment and housing, hyper-sensitive about race. In this way, it made people into victims and those accused of being discriminatory angry because they weren’t actually discriminating. As a result, this type of identity politics was incredibly destructive. In 2009, shortly after Obama took office, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed two-thirds of Americans regarded race relations as generally good. At the end of his presidency, 69% of Americans considered race relations as generally bad.
The seeds of heightened racial division that were sown with Obama continue today because of the overemphasis on race even in scenarios that have nothing to do with it. We have abandoned the vision of a colorblind society. None of this is more apparent than the recent days of violence in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy. Though this was a tragic clear case of police wrongdoing, it is not clear that there was any racial motivation; that argument is tenuous. Is the killing of a black individual by a white policeman (creating a cascade of protests costing millions of dollars) as significant or more significant than the numbers of black deaths at the hands of other black perpetrators? According to the FBI crime database for 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available, out of 2870 murders of blacks, 2570 of them were committed by other blacks, and only 243 were committed by whites, only a small percentage of whom were police. Thus, is this one (possibly) race-related death that much more important than other black-on-black deaths that occur daily? The looters and vandals, instead of bringing attention to the issue, dishonor the legacy of MLK with their behavior. He adamantly believed that:
“riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve.”
Colorblindness should continue to be a goal. We need the gentle wisdom of Martin Luther King now more than ever if we wish to get past this current era of racial divide.